Who’s going to be in the Innovation Alley at Smart Factory Expo 2018?
Meet some of the companies who have already signed up to exhibit at this industry leading event.
This article was first published in the Manufacturer on 29 August here.
The Manufacturer‘s Smart Factory Expo is Europe‚Äôs biggest showcase for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) ‚Äì a revolution in manufacturing agility, innovation and thinking. This year, 6000 attendees from technology, finance and manufacturing will visit over 250 exhibitors and choose from over 200 free-to-attend presentation sessions.
The event, in partnership with government, world-class industry professionals and expert solution providers, provides attendees and exhibitors with a platform to discuss, collaborate and grow in the age of industrial digitisation.
KTN and Innovate UK family have joined up with The Manufacturer to support this year’s Digital Manufacturing Week Smart Factory Expo in Liverpool on the 14th and 15th November 2018 and we already have some interesting companies joining us at the event.
OAL is a food tech helping food manufacturers automate. Their vision is that unmanned kitchens are the future of food production. Their robotics and automation led systems change the way food is manufactured delivering new levels of flexibility, efficiency and quality to food processing.
On show at the Expo will be their innovative APRIL Ingredient Handling system which is a robot that weighs out ingredients to an accuracy of +/- 1g, automating the person with a scoop. Recent research has identified that ingredient handling labour costs can be up to 5% of turnover, so this new innovation can significantly reduce a food manufacturing plants overheads.
Jake Norman, Head of Innovation at OAL said, “We would like to meet open-minded food manufacturers and food manufacturing professionals at Smart Factory Expo who are investigating how to introduce new technologies to improve their preparation and processing systems in their factories to make an unbeatable end product. Our innovative products make us stand out in the area of foodtech and we want to find manufacturers who have the same drive and passion as we do.”
Data gathering and analytics is a big contributor to changing the traditional manufacturing process and OCF Data apply their data analytics services to discrete and process manufacturing workflows, in order to improve up-time, throughputs and yields.
OCF Data will demonstrate their analytical manufacturing dashboards at the Expo that provide specific insights to production management in order that they can act and deliver the highest possible operational expected efficiencies. Using SPC methods for a number of condition monitoring capabilities and machine learning to identify ‘signatures’ indicates likely component failure in a predictive maintenance environment.
Cliff Brereton said, ‚ÄúBeing part of the Expo will enable us to showcase our range of data analytical services and harvest feed-back from manufacturers that we can include in upcoming service developments. We very much ‘talk’ the manufacturing language and believe that too often technology providers use Industry 4.0 jargon and fail to explain the commercial benefits to clients.¬† We will show them in ‚Äòmanufacturing terms‚Äô how they can make improvements in throughput and overall equipment efficiency (OEE) with data & analytics services.‚Äù
There are still slots available in Innovation Alley.  If you are a start-up or established players who would like to showcase your innovative solutions to manufacturers which could include advanced technology, materials, process and systems, register your interest now.